Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan is an Assistant Professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science and Center for Information Technology Policy and an Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. He studies information privacy and security, and has a side-interest in tech policy. His research has shown that data anonymization is broken in fundamental ways, for which he jointly received the 2008 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award. He is one of the researchers behind the "Do Not Track" proposal. You can follow Arvind on Twitter at @random_walker and on Google+ here.

The Do Not Track war has raged for well over a year now. There are, broadly, two Do Not Track proposals: one chiefly backed by the ad industry, and another advanced by privacy advocates. These proposals reflect vastly different visions for Do Not Track with vastly different practical consequences.

A 1993 New Yorker cartoon famously proclaimed, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The Web is a very different place today; you now leave countless footprints online. You log into websites. You share stuff on social networks. You search for information about yourself and your friends, family, and colleagues. And yet, in the debate about online tracking, ad networks and tracking companies would have you believe we're still in the early 90s — they regularly advance, and get away with, “anonymization” or “we don’t collect Personally Identifiable Information” as an answer to privacy concerns.

A frequent misconception of Do Not Track is that the goal is to prevent tracking by online advertisers. In fact, tracking is a much broader problem on the web, and our Do Not Track vision at Stanford, while principally aimed at "third-party" tracking, does not focus on specific industry segments. Barocas and Nissenbaum said it best:

There’s an ongoing arms race between ad blockers and websites — more and more sites either try to sneak their ads through or force users to disable ad blockers. Most previous discussions have assumed that this is a cat-and-mouse game that will escalate indefinitely. But in a new paper, accompanied by proof-of-concept code, we challenge this claim.

Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis is the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking to date. We measure stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and "cookie syncing".

This measurement is made possible by our web measurement tool OpenWPM, a mature platform that enables fully automated web crawls using a full-fledged and instrumented browser.

Pages

"“Once our data gets out there, it tends to be stored forever,” said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor. “There are firms that specialise in combining data about us from different sources to create virtual dossiers and applying data mining to influence us in various ways.”"

"A first step for the professors is to measure the cultural bias in the standard data sets that many researchers rely on to train their systems. From there, they will move to the question of how to build data sets and algorithms without that bias. “We can ask how to mitigate bias; we can ask how to have human oversight over these systems,” says Narayanan. “Does a visual corpus even represent the world? Can you create a more representative corpus?”"

"“The idea that mainstream consumers will directly interact with blockchain technology—or any piece of code—without intermediaries is completely silly,” wrote Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton who studies blockchain, in an email. “I think that success in these markets will be driven primarily by economies of scale, and the openness of the underlying technology is irrelevant to consumers.”"

"Earlier this year, Arvind Narayanan, a professor at Princeton, conducted research about coins that are burnt and forever unspendable. “We have all heard stories of cryptocurrency owners losing private keys, and it is impossible to estimate how many coins have been lost this way,” he said."

"“Just how bad is online tracking?” asked Arvind Narayanan, a researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, as he made a personal plea to web browser companies to take control of a worsening situation. “It’s impressively bad.”"

Pages

Solutions to many pressing economic and societal challenges lie in better understanding data. New tools for analyzing disparate information sets, called Big Data, have revolutionized our ability to find signals amongst the noise. Big Data techniques hold promise for breakthroughs ranging from better health care, a cleaner environment, safer cities, and more effective marketing. Yet, privacy advocates are concerned that the same advances will upend the power relationships between government, business and individuals, and lead to prosecutorial abuse, racial or other profiling, discrimination, redlining, overcriminalization, and other restricted freedoms.

"Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Steven Englehardt studied how all the things we do not see as users are valuable to someone on our digital trail, as our presence may be authenticated and tracked through such minutia as personalized browser settings or even our laptops' battery levels.

"While Google has used differential privacy to analyze user data from its Chrome browser, Apple is the first major tech company to adopt it more widely and publicly, said Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University.

“That’s what makes this so exciting – both for the technology and for the future of privacy protection,” he explained.

In terms of challenges, Narayanan said the technology could come with extra costs.

Abstract: Behind the hype and tumult of the markets, researchers have been quietly producing a series of exciting results about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In this paper we’ll explain why computer scientists should pay attention to these developments.